Category Archives: (after a) fashion

here i am, riding the bus, the day after i queued two hours — two — to get into the dinosaur designs sample sale. i didn’t even queue five minutes to get my book signed at the david sedaris reading last month. ok, i didn’t even queue period; deborah held a place while i walked to the front of the line to count how many fans there were ahead of us. roughly 80 made it a quick decision to abandon our posts for a splendid dinner of pasta and chocolate cake. priorities eh?

but thursday morning was a lovely day to spend in the sun, reading “the new yorker” style issue while shuffling forward at a snail’s pace outside the dinosaur designs warehouse.

i’ve wanted one of their bangles for years, but i was always too cheap to spend the big retail bucks on these chunks of plastic, no matter how lovely and handcrafted they are. the warehouse — really, the one room within the warehouse into which a select few were permitted entry every fifteen minutes or so, was the size of an average classroom, with trestle tables set up around the perimeter and an island in the center. atop these were plastic crates, and within these were a jumble of bangles and rings and necklaces and dishes and bowls and platters and vases and jugs, and the sound of fifty or eighty or however many women in total had been admitted, the sound of rifling through these hunks of resin, was like entering a mahjong den. and the jumble was somewhat less lovely (but only a teensy bit less lovely).

and i got my bangle! a pale green, not quite translucent thing, wonky round the edges. it looks like it might glow in the dark, though it doesn’t.

and what does one do the day after partaking of a sample sale, laughing in the face of that resolution to not buy anything for the rest of the year that is not food?

you could buy just over a kilo of jelly belly beans, now 20% off at the david jones confectionary department, in a fetching selection of such matching hues as very cherry, cotton candy, coconut, cream soda and chocolate pudding.

what there is, is a dairy stand selling a lightly salted butter churned from the cream of real, live, grass-eating jersey cows. if you stop to have a chat, you’ll be offered a cup of cold milk, sweet and clean. the gympie lady’s been out of butter recently, problems with milk supply and all, so i thought i’d give this one a go.

it was rather good on a slice of soft white sourdough, with a dribble of red gum honey.

of course, i have no need to worry about pickaxe accidents as i whisk deftly up the street in my new cloven-toed sneakers! or, as deftly as i can move while keeping pace with a small person whose legs are just over a foot in length.

when i returned to the store last friday afternoon, the shopgirl asked in greeting, “so, shall i pack these up for you?” she pointed at the ones i’d tried on that morning, black soles, black fabric, chunky white numbers. i looked around the room, trying to buy time, and out the corner of my eye, i saw the flash of red. and i asked to try them on. and i don’t know why i do this to myself, because now i had another thing to wrestle with.

by the end of it, i was squinting into the mirror with a red shoe on my left foot and a black one on my right, and the shopgirl was pretty convinced that i wasn’t a black shoe kinda girl.

so yeah, i got the red ones, and they have a lovely pink lining which matches my pink cloven-toed socks, with the chunky white numbers. they are so light to wear, and the thing i thought would bug me — that wedge inbetween my toes — my feet got used to pretty quickly. in fact, my toes are spread out most comfortably, and there is none of the crippling pain that comes after a day of having them wedged into my allstars, or that pinchy twinge on the side of my little toe from the slightly more comfy jack purcells. the only thing that concerns me is that such whispery light and thin soles are not cushioning my heels as i pound around my concrete environment, and i’m going to pay for this fashion moment with years of chronic knee problems.

(the only other thing that concerns me is that i may have to go back and get the black ones after all.)

it is with some sadness that i am retiring my faithful old backpack, with its frayed edges, wayward (completely broken off, for the second time) shoulder strap, and gruesome stains on the inside. i bought it several years ago in a shop full of cute things in new york city, and even then, i think it hung around my cupboard for a few months before i finally put it to use. this was some time in 1998, and the first time i carried it out, i stowed my takeaway salad lunch, and when i got back to my desk i discovered that at the bottom of my pristine bag was a puddle of oily, vinegary salad dressing. that first week, every time i caught a whiff of the lingering odour, i felt a little bit sour.

this bag was mostly waterproof (from the outside, at least, and hey, it had kept the salad dressing sealed in), and it was the perfect size for carrying magazines around. it had a recipe for cherry pie on one side, and on the other, “fluffy pudding”. it was made by super planning co., who also brought you mr. friendly. a pedigree bag.

people always wanted to know where i got my bag; strangers in the street would stop me and ask, and i always felt like a bit of a dick when i answered, “new york”. but i carried it everywhere, and when one of the straps broke off a few years ago, i stitched it back on, and it carried on like a champ. even through the sudden but brief infestation of ants. i had it with me as i boarded the plane to london three months ago. it was full of books and magazines and snacks and toys and cameras and passports, and when i picked it up after the boarding announcement, the tired strap gave way.

since then it has sat on the floor, first in the corner of nellie‘s spare room in her london flat, and then propped up against my bookshelf in the study. i’ve been making do with a couple of totes, one calico and the other dark denim. which is fine and all, but i fear the weight on one shoulder is doing terrible things to my back. (well. that and the lack of yoga or swimming.)

so, i’m finally breaking out the new one, a long-ago gift from nellie, from the same shop even, from when she was a new york city girl. it’s sort of the same, but not quite the same. it’s coming on a mini roadtrip with me — tomorrow we wind our way down to melbourne. i don’t have much planned, except to have a sausage at the markets, some chocolate at koko black, and read my new new yorker, in which there is an indepth article on pastry.

i bought a black t shirt recently, which is only a momentous occasion when you take into account that the last black t shirt — black anything, really — i bought was like, eight years ago.

this one has a big white puffy-paint skull ‘n’ crossbones on the front, except the crossbones are actually hearts. it makes me feel like jimbo jones, and also reminds me of when i was fourteen and sometimes wore a big silver ring in the shape of a skull. i bought it along the way, during a highschool art trip through thailand.

the weird thing is that right after i paid for it, these two middle-aged chinese women sidled up to the counter and bought one too!

having recently spent like, $311 on new spectacles, which the shopgirl (“frame consultant”) assured me were *very* fashionable and just what everyone was wearing in paris at the moment, and which ironically made me want them less, and which obviously in the end didn’t matter because I got them anyway… i was kinda hoping that my level of blindness would stabilise for a while. and i think it did. but this week, with noise kicking in for the year, and print deadlines growling, baring fangs and schwiping claws at me from every direction, i feel helpless against the pulled-tight eye muscles that reward me at the end of each day. living in soft focus isn’t quite as romantic as it sounds.